Ben Macintyre

In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1944, a thin, and unusually elegant, housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted mother-of-three, attentive wife and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity. However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, Ursula Kuczynski -� codename Sonya �- was heading for the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific secrets from a nuclear physicist. Secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the atomic bomb. In Agent Sonya, Ben Macintyre reveals the astonishing story behind the most important woman spy in history and the huge emotional cost that came with being a mother, a wife, and a secret agent at once.

On a chill December night in 1942, a Nazi parachutist landed in a Cambridgeshire field. His mission: to sabotage the British war effort. His German masters called him Fritz, or Fritzchen. The British police knew him as Eddie Chapman. Within weeks Chapman was in the hands of MI5 and operating as Agent Zigzag.

In a forbidding Gothic castle on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, an unlikely band of British officers spent the Second World War plotting daring escapes from their German captors. Or so the story of Colditz has gone, unchallenged for 70 years. But that tale contains only part of the truth.

The astonishing inside story, revealed for the first time by bestselling historian Ben Macintyre, is a tale of the indomitable human spirit, but also one of class conflict, homosexuality, espionage, insanity and farce. Through an astonishing range of material, Macintyre reveals a remarkable cast of characters, wider than previously seen and hitherto hidden from history, taking in prisoners and captors who were living cheek-by-jowl in a thrilling game of cat and mouse.

From the elitist members of the Colditz Bullingdon Club to America's oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent, the soldier-prisoners of Colditz were courageous and resilient as well as vulnerable and fearful -- and astonishingly imaginative in their desperate escape attempts. Deeply researched and full of incredible human stories, this is the definitive book on Colditz.

A captivating narrative of the spies who wove a web so intricate it ensnared Hitler's army and carried thousands of D-Day troops across the channel to safety.

One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set off a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. Richard & Judy Bookclub

In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was radical and entirely against the rules: a small undercover unit that would inflict mayhem behind enemy lines.

Despite intense opposition, Winston Churchill personally gave Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he could find. So began the most celebrated and mysterious military organisation in the world: the SAS.

Now, 75 years later, the SAS has finally decided to tell its astonishing story. It has opened its secret archives for the first time, granting historian Ben Macintyre full access to a treasure trove of unseen reports, memos, diaries, letters, maps and photographs, as well as free rein to interview surviving Originals and those who knew them.

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens.

A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS - hitherto an organisation shrouded in secrecy - laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod.

Drawing on unpublished source material, exclusive interviews with the SAS, and testimony from witnesses including hostages, negotiators, intelligence officers and the on-site psychiatrist, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes readers on a gripping journey from the years and weeks of build-up on both sides, to the minute-by-minute account of the siege and rescue.

On a July evening in 1985, a middle-aged man stood on the pavement of a busy avenue in Moscow, holding a plastic carrier bag. He looked like any other Soviet citizen, but the man was a spy. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets. The bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of spying.

Kim Philby spent his school days at Eton, and during his time at Cambridge he was recruited by the KGB. This biography follows his illustrious career at the heart of MI6. Here, over the course of two decades he passed top secret information to his Soviet spymasters and sabotaged virtually every major Anglo-American operation.